


Plan B

by coldcobalt



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Denial, Fisher Price My Very First PWP, Insecurity, M/M, Mutual Masturbation, Pre-Roche, Sexual Inexperience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:20:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22722352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldcobalt/pseuds/coldcobalt
Summary: Dan knows he's not a powerful man.Written for the 2020 Watchmen Winter Wonderswap.
Relationships: Dan Dreiberg/Rorschach
Comments: 3
Kudos: 91





	Plan B

**Author's Note:**

  * For [itsdoctorlinus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsdoctorlinus/gifts).



Dan knows he’s not a powerful man. He can fake it sometimes — usually after an especially productive patrol, steering Archie over the city with his knuckles bruised and his blood humming — but, mostly, he’s pretty average. He listens to NPR, for god’s sake.

But now, with Rorschach panting under him, back arched against the flight deck in furious desperation, Dan feels like he can take on the world.

\----------------------------------------

It’s not the month-long dry spell that gets them to this point, but that sure helps things along: weeks of gang warfare and back-to-back stakeouts, spans of longer patrols and shorter tempers. Any kind of touching is out of the question.

So Dan goes with Plan B. It feels a little pathetic, to be alone in a too-big apartment with a bottle of lube, gasping into the darkness like a teenager. It leaves him more embarrassed than relieved.

\----------------------------------------

But, finally, finally, the neverending case ends, and Dan finds himself stripped to the waist at ten thousand feet, Rorschach biting at his neck.

The mask is halfway across the cockpit, Rorschach’s naked face and chest lit red from below by the altimeter, and this is so different from their few fumbled hookups. It isn’t costumed grinding in alleyways, the half-glimpsed flash of a freckled clavicle, the frantic scrape of stubble. Now they have all the time in the world.

Dan knows he’s not a powerful man. But maybe he wants to feel like one, just once.

*

“Hey.” Dan whispers, heart in his throat in the four AM darkness, “Wait. There’s no rush.”

Rorschach opens his mouth, gearing up to voice his annoyance or a protest or both, but whatever he’s about to say cuts off with a strangled noise. Dan cups the points of Rorschach’s hipbones, slides his palms down pinstriped thighs: close, but not close enough.

Something seizes in Rorschach’s throat. He sputters, violent flush blooming across his face and shoulders, below the bruises and leftover swaths of rooftop grit. Dan has seen Rorschach lay junkies twice his size out cold on the pavement; watched him scrap with multiple assailants and emerge victorious, chest heaving, blood on his teeth. But now, he’s silent, still, _compliant_. Flat penny eyes locked on Dan, waiting for his next move.

It’s embarrassing, how much of an effect it’s having. Dan’s so hard it hurts.

Another thought comes, uninvited: Rorschach pleading, panting Dan’s name over and over, untouched and desperate. It’s just a guilty fantasy, hazy and unreal, but it makes Dan sink down into the captain’s chair, head spinning.

Rorschach steps closer, stands looming in the space between Dan’s spread legs.

The light of the navigation display catches the ceiling panels. Dan stares up at them, then the eye-level fly of Rorschach’s trousers and contemplates doing something really stupid.

For a few horrible seconds, he’s a pudgy college kid again, stammering a shameful fantasy into the side of some girl’s neck. He takes a deep breath, runs a clammy hand up Rorschach’s arm.

“I want to watch.” he says, face hot. “I want to see you touch yourself.”

*

Rorschach jerks back like he’s been burned, cups one hand protectively around his open fly as if he suddenly needs to hide his clothed erection from view. His brows knit. He looks scandalized.

“I don’t do that,” he says, low and dangerous. But he doesn’t back away.

And that answers some long-standing questions, because Dan _has_ wondered. Had caught himself, mid-jerk-off, thinking about his partner: how often Rorschach would curl around himself, hand working furiously, severe mouth bitten raw.

(Had wondered, usually in the split seconds before he came, if Rorschach ever thought of him.)

“I’m not touching you,” Dan says, adrenaline (disappointment?) crashing through him and he can’t even think right now, this feels so good. His cheeks burn. “You’re gonna have to do it.” He slides his hand up a knobby spine, reassuring, and he doesn’t know why this is so important suddenly, just knows that it _is._

“I don’t. _Do_ that.” Rorschach spits again. He’s over enunciating like there’s some misunderstanding and Dan finally deciphers what’s really being communicated here. _I don’t,_ his partner is saying. But what he means, for reasons unknown, is really _I can’t._

Dan traces the pad of his thumb across the bottom of Rorschach’s stomach, brings it to a stop next to the straining outline of his dick. Lets Rorschach lean forward to press their foreheads together, shoulders twitching with arrested violence. 

The boots come off, the grey tights too, and the last traces of Nite Owl’s costume slide to the floor, forgotten. When Dan folds down his boxers and cups a hand around himself, he doesn’t even try to muffle the noise that follows. 

Rorschach’s hands curl on pinstriped thighs.

“I’m not waiting for you,” Dan whispers; he wants to sound suave and commanding but his voice cracks on the last syllable, dissolves into a moan. Just a few strokes of skin on skin and his entire body is already shaking with pleasure and how does Rorschach _stand_ it?

A rough sound in the back of Rorschach’s throat, high and needy, silenced before it can really slip free. A month is such a long time.

(And he’s not pleading, not with words. But it was never really about that, was it?)

There’s a rustle of cloth, a quiet grunt. Rorschach pulls himself out of his uniform in a single motion, the head of his cock obscured by the angle of his torso. His strokes are uneven, desperate; it makes Dan want to say something stupid, something dumb and out-of-place. He suppresses the urge. 

Instead, Dan settles for leaning in and planting a kiss under the severe jawline. He pulls his partner closer, feeling the frantic brush of his knuckles between them and the rabbiting of his pulse.

A fractured groan into the side of Dan’s neck, a fragment of a name, and that’s all it takes; Dan wrings his hand up his dick, spots flaring behind his eyelids like misfiring circuits, and comes so hard his vision stutters out.

*

When Rorschach finishes across Dan’s stomach seconds later — silently, thighs trembling, backlit by the dashboard lights — it feels better than any college hookup, any fantasy Dan’s ever had.

It feels like being wanted.

\----------------------------------------

Their next few patrols are uneventful. Small stuff, really — a B-and-E, some petty arson — but mostly, it’s just the two of them, wandering dusk ‘til dawn. Striding through striated streetlights, New York theirs and theirs alone.

It’s after one of these that Dan’s nerves finally get the best of him; he puts Archie on autopilot, fiddles with some console settings just to occupy his hands. It’s a stupid, clumsy question that he’s grappling with. None of his business. But he has to _know._

“Have you, uh, been thinking? About me?”

A horrible silence. Rorschach turns in the copilot seat, mask inscrutable and Dan almost wants to retract the words, strike them from the record, phase through Archie’s floor and fall at terminal velocity to the city below. 

Because underneath his vigilante persona, he’s just _Dan_ , a man cowering behind an owl motif and a handful of gadgets; he’s awkward and anxious and why would anyone ever fantasize about —

The copilot seat creaks. 

“Yes.” Rorschach says, a grudging confession, and Dan understands exactly what that means.

Then Dan is slammed into the console with all the grace of a streetside takedown, arms pinned against the metal. There’s the firm weight of a compact body pressed against him, hands tearing at his belt, and there isn’t much talking after that.

*

Dan knows he’s not a powerful man, not really. But what does power matter, when he has this?


End file.
